The Pied Piper of Death (27 page)

“I'm listening.”

“I … I'm not only a reasonable man, I'm a reasonably wealthy man. I can make you rich. Rich beyond your wildest dreams. You'll have so much the women won't care how tall you are.”

“You really know how to appeal to a dwarf, Piper. Christ, I'd like to put one through your gullet right now.”

“Please.” Peyton slid down the face of the tombstone and pressed his head against the side as his hands attempted to pull the protective stonework over him as a shield.

“Walk through the mines like a man, for God's sake,” Rabbit yelled shrilly. “Get off your knees. You Pipers are all alike. It's in the blood, Peyton. From the coward colonel who wouldn't go on the bridge to you his sniveling progeny. The genes in you are as rotten and cowardly as they always have been.”

“Your great granddad survived the bridge. He got a medal. He came home to Bridgeway and lived here the rest of his life.”

“And swore to uphold the covenant every day of that life.”

“I'll give you everything I have,” the kneeling man pleaded.

“You have a chance if you walk directly toward me through the mines. If you don't, I'm coming over there to kill you. You just might make it through the field. Zigzag as much as you want. By the way, when they explode they bounce a few feet in the air and then go boom.”

Peyton dragged himself erect once more and took a tentative step toward Rabbit. “We can negotiate a deal.”

“Keep coming.”

“Okay, okay.” Peyton took several steps before he stopped. He kneeled and shoved his hands at an oblique angle slowly into the thin layer of soil. He cupped his fingers around the base of a mine below the pressure plate and raised it slowly aloft where it trembled in his shaking hands. He gently put it aside. “I think you laid a simple triangular pattern here.”

“Maybe yes. Maybe no.”

Peyton took a few more steps. He kept his eyes constantly on the ground to look for the telltale contours of metal pressure plates that would ignite a Tommy. He walked another five feet before he bent over again and gingerly began to feel through the soil for the sides of another mine.

“We can work something out,” Peyton said as he laid the second mine aside.

“You reach me and you are home safe,” Rabbit responded.

“I can give you a cash settlement,” Peyton said with a forced smile. The result was a skewered caricature of the social greeting that had gotten him so much in life. “My lawyers can work it out in a trust so you don't have tax problems.”

“At this moment, tax problems really worry me,” Rabbit said.

Again Peyton willed his wide social smile. “Come on, kid, let's go check out the wine cellar.”

“Keep coming, boss man. Remember, the Tommy that gets you might not kill you. It might only blow you in half.”

“Time out,” Peyton said as flippantly as he could muster. He bent to search for the next mine.

“Oh, boy,” Rabbit said simultaneously with the small pop of the mine's initial explosion.

The Tommy erupted straight up from the soil like a miniature flying saucer. Four feet off the ground it exploded with a dull thud that reverberated across the hills. Dozens of stainless steel balls thudded into the stone structure behind Lyon and Bea. At the opposite end of the cemetery pellets shattered the front windshield of the backhoe.

“You still alive, Peyton?” Rabbit called.

No answer. Lyon stood to shade his eyes and look across the Piper Pie toward the spot where Peyton had been standing. A small crater surrounded by mounds of recently spread topsoil, which were molded into piles like gigantic animal leavings, marked the spot. “Peyton!” Lyon yelled.

“This has got to end,” a weak voice said. Peyton had thrown himself behind a tombstone when the Tommy detonated. His quick reaction had protected him from the mine's powerful secondary explosion. He slowly straightened up. Deep facial lines which had once radiated a dominant assurance had reformed into weak crevices, giving the impression of a personality dissolved. “I can't do this anymore,” he said. “Let me go. Please.”

Lyon walked down the path Peyton had cleared of mines. “Enough of this, Rabbit.”

“He's not thinking right,” Bea called after him.

“Stop where you are, Wentworth,” Rabbit said. “I have no quarrel with you, but I will shoot if I have to.”

Lyon stopped midway between the mausoleum and backhoe. “Exactly what are you doing?”

“As a young man I took a blood oath to fulfill the Covenant of the Bridge,” Rabbit said. “If that vow is to be broken forevermore, it has to come to an end in a fitting way. This is that way.” During the conversation Rabbit had stood up behind the backhoe. He stepped around the edge still gripping the rifle firmly.

Rocco still lay prone on the walk in front of the mausoleum. He steadied his right wrist with his left hand. His elbows propped on the flat surface gave him a steady aiming platform for his .357 magnum. He estimated that the small man with the rifle was now less than fifty yards away. There was little wind. The only impediments to the shot were the two men standing directly in front of Rabbit.

Lyon shifted slightly to the right, giving Rocco a clear lane of fire. The police chief estimated that he would be able to fire at least twice before Rabbit had a chance to react. It would be one of the most difficult shots of his career. It had to be done. He did not want to kill, but circumstances dictated that he try for a fatal wound.

“I think that you're holding a chicken shit hand and I'm calling,” Peyton said. His stature straightened as his body language indicated he had made a different assumption and was proceeding on a new track.

The others watched in amazement as Peyton's transformation propelled him toward Rabbit.

“You're making a mistake,” Bea called to him.

“I know this man,” Peyton said. “He doesn't have the balls to take me on.”

“I wouldn't count on that,” Rocco added.

“Once a servant always a minion. You know, little man,” Peyton said, “I just realized that the reason you couldn't kill Paula like your so-called blood vow required, was because you don't have the gonads to do it. You couldn't kill her just like you had to use land mines in your attempt to get me. Well, I've figured out the dumb little pattern of explosives you've placed and now I'm going to rip that rifle out of your stubby little hands and stuff it down your constricted little throat.”

Rabbit was expressionless. The rifle held at his waist drooped toward the ground.

“Everyone down!” Rocco's yelled command was to clear the path for his own impending shot.

Lyon immediately dropped to the ground while Bea inched back behind Rocco.

Peyton ignored the command as he continued a zigzag walk toward the man with the rifle.

Another pop signified the activation of a Tommy mine. Peyton's look was of absolute confusion. He had obviously miscalculated, and it was difficult for him to assimilate this fact. He hesitated a microsecond too long before stepping to the side, where another pop activated a second mine.

Both munitions devices rose into the air and exploded.

Whistling hot shrapnel passed harmlessly over Lyon's head and rattled against the wall above Rocco and Bea.

In the other direction, the exploding canisters released another salvo of a hundred projectiles that passed above the short man's head.

The two charges hit Peyton from opposite directions and flung him backward over a tombstone.

Lyon was the first to reach the body. He knelt by the man's side to reach toward the lolling head to clear an airway.

Rocco stood over him. “Forget it. Nothing can be done.”

Bea was the first to see Frieda come through the cemetery gates, walking resolutely toward her husband. The rigidity of her posture and the stiff movement of her legs signaled her anxiety. She carried something clutched in her right hand. Bea realized that the Welch cottage was only a quarter of a mile away, and Frieda must have heard the shots and guessed at their origin.

Frieda walked through the cemetery behind the backhoe. She held a cast iron frying pan tightly as she looked at her husband's back with eyes of infinite sadness.

She walked silently up behind him and brought the skillet down on the center of his head.

Rabbit fell forward into the dirt. Frieda reached for the rifle and tossed it aside.

“It's over, Rabbit,” she said. “It's all over.”

S
EVENTEEN

Bea Wentworth lay on the edge of the large bed at Nutmeg Hill and stared at the ceiling while dawn crept upriver from the sea. Lyon had captured the bulk of the covers and was splayed by her side consuming the majority of the space.

“What have I done?” she whispered softly into the awakening day. “Whatever possessed me to do that?”

“Yeah,” Lyon mumbled as he turned to face in the opposite direction while yanking the remains of the covers over his shoulders. “You did it with your own little motion from the floor of the convention,” he said without a trace of sleep in his voice.

“You phony!” She sat bolt upright to hit him over the head with her pillow. “I've been lying here silently suffering and you knew it all along.”

“Only since your conscience began shouting to the rooftops over that nomination you made at the state convention yesterday.”

“I thought I was suffering quietly. Besides, Roger Candlin might make a good U.S. senator.”

“Sure he will, as long as he has Bismarck and Maeterlinck to give him aid and comfort. Actually, the governor told me she thought your nomination by acclamation was a brilliant move. It keeps the party from a possible primary election blood bath. No one dares to oppose Roger. But whatever possessed you to nominate him?”

“For a mad instant it seemed logical. We got rid of him as a problem by kicking him upstairs. Roger is shrewd and Machiavellian, but honest within those parameters. The nomination gets him out of the day-to-day running of state politics, which we need. Everything was going along fine until he realized what I was doing. That's why he got his revenge by having his minions nominate me.”

“Maybe you'll like Congress. You've got a good chance to win since the congressional district overlaps your senatorial district.”

“If that happens, I'd be beholden to Roger for his nomination. I can't stand that thought.”

“Think of the alternative. It might have been Peyton running for the Senate.”

“I suppose.” She lay back on the pillows, contemplating an imaginary panorama that moved across the blank ceiling. “How long do you think Rabbit will be in prison?”

“Of his twelve years, he should be out in five unless he does something rash. Unfortunately, knowing Rabbit, that is altogether too possible.”

“Katherine and Paula tell me they're going to keep Bridgeway, but they might turn it over to the state as a park. Either way, Rabbit has a job when he returns and he and Frieda can keep the little house.”

“That's something positive.” Lyon felt her loom over him as her hair brushed gently across his forehead. She bent to whisper in his ear the few words that shattered the moment.

“There's someone downstairs.”

Her lips slid across his neck as he twisted his head to hear better. Over the years Nutmeg Hill's creak and groan house sounds had become as familiar to him as the workings of his own body. “I don't hear anything.” He reached around her waist and pulled her closer. “But as long as you're here, I've got a great idea.”

“Knock it off,” she whispered in his ear and shifted. “I tell you, I hear someone walking around down there. Get your gun.”

“I don't own a gun.”

“Set the attack dog on them.”

“We don't have a dog either,” Lyon said. “But I do smell coffee. Do burglars usually start the coffee machine?”

“Do you hear someone searching the bread box for a stale Danish and the liquor cabinet for our good vodka?”

“Both.”

“Okay, so now we know who it is. Go down there and do something to him for scaring me to death,” Bea said as she tumbled over him to lay on her stomach and scrunch a pillow over her ears.

Her last remaining sheet slipped away and he saw that she was wearing his pajama top. For reasons he didn't quite understand, he thought this far more erotic than if she were completely nude. Her right hand marched across the mattress searching for covers. He pulled the blanket over her as he reluctantly left the bed.

Rocco was pouring coffee into mugs as Lyon shuffled down the backstairs still belting his terry cloth robe. The police chief handed him a coffee mug.

“How did you know I wasn't a guard dog who at this very moment would be leaping for your throat?” Lyon asked.

“After living with you, the most ferocious pit bull would be out in the yard playing with his rubber ducks. You have company in the living room, but read this first.” He handed Lyon an official-looking document.

“What's this so early in the morning?” Lyon asked as he squinted at the blue-backed legal-size document with the town clerk's embossed seal displayed at the bottom of the page.

“The Selectmen passed a new town ordinance last night. To summarize, it states that any lighter-than-air device without proper gondolas or passenger-carrying undercarriages are banned from the town limits of Murphysville. I believe this includes your Cloudhopper.”

“My balloon seems to be the only vehicle covered by the rule unless Tinker Bell decides to practice aerobatics over the town green.”

“The volunteer firemen made sure I had a copy immediately.”

“What are you supposed to do about it?”

“Arrest the perps, I guess,” Rocco said with a smile. “Or at the very least, shoot them down somehow.”

“I'm not quite sure that's legal, but then again I'm not sure I want to test the ordinance. What am I supposed to do? When I fly a balloon I go where the wind carries me.”